A bit about me and Tarot: The Beginning
10/09/2009
Like many other folks, I’m sure, my interest in Tarot started when one of my college friends asked me, “Would you like a Tarot reading?” We were at a Mardi Gras celebration, enjoying cozy conversation and hard cider. I knew of Tarot, vaguely, from my introduction to T.S. Eliot’s The Wasteland during my freshman year of college. I agreed, and he began to shuffle the cards.
He was using the Thoth Tarot, which, if you’re unfamiliar with that deck, has very beautiful, very dense imagery. It is also, erm, just a bit sexually charged. I asked my question, and he gave me my reading. I don’t remember a lot, now, about the intricacies of the question and his commentary except that my significator turned out to be the Princess of Cups.
He explained: “Everything is within your reach – you have all these resources - but nothing’s truly yours.” That made so much sense. It was a time of potentialities, of possibilities budding – but no harvest, no fruit, not yet. I was enjoying my life and world immensely, but suffering from a nagging feeling that I should have more direction, more focus. That reading, especially that one kernel of wisdom, accompanied by the artwork on the card, did what I love most about Tarot: it helped me grasp the shape of my current situation. It didn’t tell me what to do, nor did it give me a crystal-clear picture of what the future would hold. It simply gave me a framework for understanding and working with my life, as it was at that moment. It helped me understand that it’s okay to have fun with possibilities, to try different things and see which are worth keeping.
It’s that ability to illuminate and re-frame circumstances which has kept me fascinated with Tarot, kept me coming back to and exploring it. I hope your own journey with Tarot is filled with similar experiences.
